Abstract
Cooper (2017) highlighted that scholars and admirers often care for intellectual icons by freezing them in place – either through conversations that demand these icons be interpreted the same way across time or by relegating a piece of work to a specific temporal moment. In fact, discussing the work of Black women’s intellectual icons, Cooper (2017) wrote that “Such acts are rooted in both care and carelessness. We care enough not to let these women be thrown away, but in many respects, the dearth of critical engagements with most of the women under consideration in this book suggests a lack of critical care in handling their intellectual contributions” (p. 2). This rhetorical freezing does little to fully explore the multidimensionality of the intellectual. Cooper’s comment is especially relevant to the much larger interdisciplinary legacy and critique of Black intellectual thought in Charles Athanasopoulos’ Black Iconoclasm: Public Symbols, Racial Progress, and Post/Ferguson America. Black Iconoclasm asks us to move beyond the images of Blackness and instead care for the struggles, hopes, and innovative thinking spurring everyday Blackness.
Charles Athanasopoulos, an Assistant Professor of Black Rhetoric & Popular Culture at The Ohio State University, operates at the intersection of Black studies, Caribbean studies, and Critical Romani Studies. His diasporic commitments permeate Black Iconoclasm to offer a means for deeply caring for others – much like the way Brittney Cooper insists. Rather than shy away from the unknown or resist the confusion that can accompany difference, Athanasopoulos not only attempts to dig deeper and unsettle the fissures surfacing when Blackness clashes with itself but also as Blackness confronts systematic physical and intellectual silos constructed from white, Eurocentic paradigms. Black Iconoclasm is not trying to freeze racial icons as one type of icon, nor is it suggesting Black icons have a rigid trajectory in how they are venerated or created within Black communities and beyond. Black Iconoclasm is undoubtedly concerned with the opposite. Such dedication to taking care of Afrodiasporic intellectuals’ work and experiences can only suggest that Athanasopoulos’ work in Black Iconoclasm is, at its core, a love letter to Blackness’ potential and kinetic energy.
Black Iconoclasm finds meaning in things that appear untethered or overwhelmingly interconnected; however, the goal of finding a meaning in knotted contexts, symbols, and interactions is not to make them untangled or clear. Black Iconoclasm’s goal is to illuminate the untapped potential of sitting with seeming chaos. In discussing Black Iconoclasm (both as a noun and a verb), Athanasopoulos calls on readers to interrogate with care, “Rather than rendering yes/no judgements on cultural products or entire schools of thought, Black Iconoclasm zooms in on Black rhetorics, media, and popular culture to consider how they reflect both Black radical excess and iconographic residues” (p. 38). Athanasopoulos’ five chapters (along with a prologue and epilogue) demonstrate how care for Black intellectual legacies through Black iconoclasm can produce generative meaning-making revelations. In addition to the traditional chapters, Athanasopoulos intersperses a three-part, creative short story about Black Icarus which is “a cautionary tale” and gestures toward creative ways of “wrestling with the Black radical excess and iconographic residues” that pigeonhole Blackness in particular ways (p. 40).
Chapter 1 uses an example of renaming buildings to call attention to the messy optical, rhetorical, and spatial politics reinforcing public creation and consumption of icons. As such, this example (and chapter) illuminates how these icons hail or interpolate Blackness in various communities and answers the chapter’s guiding questions: “How do we discern Black radical thought and activism from the co-options of Western Man? Are we doomed to repeat a cycle of destroying a few icons only to inevitably produce new ones?” (p. 38). Leaning on Christina Sharpe, Katherine McKitrrick, and Louis M. Maraj, Athanasopoulos displays how these messy interconnected renderings of Blackness complicate long-standing anti-Black relationships and cultural, situated knowledge.
The following chapter, Chapter 2, offers “an iconoclastic genealogy [that] grapples with the moments of fracture and transition surrounding the BLM movement [. . .] Rather than reading BLM as a unitary movement which was once iconoclastic and is now iconographic, Black iconoclasm focuses on the fractures around the shared BLM moniker to wrestle with [its] multiple trajectories” (p. 38). This chapter gives readers a BRT practical case study of how to enact a method of an iconoclastic critique – namely through recognizing divergent interests, names, and ideological frameworks that are often systematically and simultaneously mobilized to portray or maintain certain iconic statuses. Using #BLM as the case study to unpack differences through Black feminist narrative(s), geospatial critique, and Black liberatory practices reinscribed with our post/Ferguson era, Athanasopoulos leaves us with the reverberating question from Audre Lorde: “which me will survive all these liberations?” (p. 72) to come to terms with an unsettling reality.
The next chapter, Chapter 3, imposes a theoretically dense but wonderfully generative concept map entangled with religion, philosophy, and Black intellectual thought. Here, Athanasopoulos unpacks Black iconoclasm as a ritual mode of transgression and Black radical discernment by meditating on Frantz Fanon’s claim that decolonization is a “program of complete disorder” (p. 100). With this in mind, “this chapter unsettles dominant forms of Fanonism (i.e., how different schools of thought engage Fanon’s contributions) by re-reading Fanon’s notion of ‘new humanism’ and ‘tabula rasa’” (p. 38) against the grain to better understand productive possibilities of dis/order. This chapter’s goal suggests that a “liminal process of disorder(ing) disassembles the dialectics” of binary thinking are “illusions of an anti/Black iconography constraining radical invention” (p. 102). Blending Fanon, Nietzsche, and Moten, Athanasopoulos’ nuanced mediation exemplifies the necessity of sitting with “Black excess” and “residue” that he calls for in every chapter; it reaffirms how recursivity can be enacted to constantly constitute new understandings of our own situatedness and knowledge mobilization.
Chapter 4 is probably one of the most influential and poignant chapters of the book. Athanasopoulos uses his mediation of Fanon to “theorize Fanonian slips as the misfires that may occur in communicative situations demonstrating the operation of racial icons on the level of the interpersonal, political, and internal” (pp. 38–39). The introduction of “Fanonian slips” is game changing; it is something that everyone has experienced or caught on to but could not name. Using multiple narrative examples from presidential speeches to personal anecdotes, Athanasopoulos builds on Maraj’s use of “inter(con)textual reading” and Hortense Spillers notion of “grammar” (p. 155) to reinvent what a “Freudian slip” means when analyzed through an anti/Black lens. Athanasopoulos not only captures the ubiquitous nature of those “slips of the tongue” but identifies their insidious metonymic behaviors and rhetorical afterlives which can ultimately impact the way we understand, navigate, talk about, and think through racial tropes or stereotypes.
Both chapters 5 and 6 challenge our understanding of Black iconoclasms’ visual import. Chapter 5 reads four films [Antebellum (2020), Judas and the Black Messiah (2021), and the two Black Panther films (2018; 2022)] within an emerging genre of post/Ferguson American cinema which argues that “[t]hese [film] directors echo contemporary Black radical activism” as a means for “meditating on anti-Black violence in the status quo and refusing static images of Blackness” (Athanasopoulos, 2024, p. 190). Recognizing an emerging genre that consumes Black iconoclasms’ visual aesthetics highlights emergent ways Blackness simultaneously “diverg[es] yet interconnect[s] narratives [that] upend the idea that iconography and iconoclasm represent a simple dualism” and instead calls for acknowledging the kinship between “Black radical disruption and institutional capture” where “Black refusal always contains forms of invention that exceed that which they negate” (Athanasopoulos, 2024, p. 39). Chapter 6 extends this visual exploration by engaging with Édouard Glissant’s notion of a poetics of relation to explore the recursive relationship between organic moments of protest and its resultant, visual, aesthetic ephemera. Taking a closer look at a “BLM graffiti-wall-turned-mural reveal[ed] [the] multiple trajectories [of Black Iconography] which both disrupt and exceed racial icons” (p. 244), Athanasopoulos showcases the interrelated networks of body, art, and politics that undergo public transformation.
Chapter 7 calls on readers to (re)consider relationships between power, refusal, fractures, creation, and Blackness. Athanasopoulos leaves us with a concluding paradox to consider: “embracing a proposal of complete disorder means admitting that, despite our best efforts, it is often hard to discern icons from iconoclasm” (p. 39).
While the conventional chapters offer readers a deep investigation of how Blackness is dynamic, paradoxical, and innovative, Athanasopoulos reminds us they are only part of the story. Athanasopoulos enacts the tabula rasa (or scraping the tablet clean) almost as a ritualistic practice embracing the challenge of knowing what we know. In other words, Black Iconoclasm unravels theoretical threads that question how Blackness becomes substantiated and mobilized. Some readers might find the organization of this book a little overwhelming with its interchapters, creative writing, and number of chapters. However, I find that design innovative and reinvigorating. This book is not a standard academic book. It demonstrates a high level of care for Black thought with its intentional interventions of form and entangled personal narratives. This work is exceedingly poignant, timely, and endearing with its unquestionable love for Blackness and Black intellectual thought.
I can easily find a place for this reading (in my own personal collection or in my graduate classes) alongside Ferreria de Silva (2007) who thinks through “the transparency theory,” Towns’s (2022) provocative question “what happens if Black studies opens up a new mode for theorizing the centrality and materiality of media?” (p. 16) in On Black Media Philosophy, Vorris Nunley’s theory of hush harbors (2011), and Alexander Weheliye’s discussion of assemblages (2014) – not to mention the work of authors like Christina Sharpe, Katherine McKittrick, and Louis M. Maraj mentioned within this books’ very pages. Similar to these scholars named above, Black Iconoclasm makes an important intervention in Black studies, rhetorical theory, and religious studies by offering readers a way to sit with the “discomfort” and deeply engage with the ways Blackness is understood and represented in different theoretical threads. The practice of Black iconoclasm rejects either/or practices of trading in Blackness that often ask us to side with one or another scholar, to accept one or another conceptual rendering, to embrace one or another school of thought; instead, Athanasopoulos’ work demonstrates productive ways for slowing down, taking care, and spending time with what, why, and how we simultaneously understand Blackness on systematic, conceptual, and pragmatic levels.
